Joseph Stalin is known as a controversial personality in history. Although he was claimed to be a ruthless dictator, almost 60 years after his death it turned out that he is respected by the Russian people. In the TV show TheName of Russia, meant to choose the most influential personalities in Russian history, Stalin took third place. What is more, many famous Russian public figures support Stalin’s revival regardless of the fact that authorities do not like this. Definitely Stalin could not be such a cruel dictator and still loved by his people in the same time.

Effective manager

According to Anatoliy Wasserman, proved to be one of the wisest people in modern Russia, explained why Stalin is claimed by many to have been an effective manager. Wasserman says that the “Great Purge” from 1937, usually blamed on Stalin, was a deed of the local authorities, who, as participants of the Revolution, could cope with anti-state plot only through mass repression – the only way they knew from the Revolution and eventually lead to collateral damage. Stalin, together with the party secretary Beria, actually stopped the repressions by annihilating communist local authorities who caused the purges. It is interesting to know, Khruschev was one of the bloodiest leaders of these repressions and somehow managed not to get killed when Stalin decided to exterminate local communist bosses to stop repressions. Actually many secret documents from the 1930s just vanished under Khruschev’s rule, which is illustrative of the fact that he wanted to hide some facts and create the myth that Stalin somehow could control thousands of proceedings at law in the same time.

The juridical side

The writer Nikolay Starikov, an author of bestsellers about the financial crisis, emphasizes on the fact that Stalin has never been convicted of any crimes, in contrast to Hitler. In spite of the many years of democracy and almost five decades of official disrespect to Stalinism by the authorities, no one has ever tried to condemn it – even the popular human rights advocates. Starikov explains: “They do not want to look like idiots”.

If the number of the people sentenced to death during Stalin’s regime was really measured in millions, it would be similar the number of victims in WW2, which is evidently does not make sense and is easy to prove.

Stalin in philosophy and society

The philosopher Alexandr Dugin defines Stalin as a constant in Russian history, an archetype of a “father of the nation” and a leader. Dugin states: “The existence of our society is impossible without Grozni, without Peter І, without Stalin.”

Talking about Stalin’s popularity in Russia, Yakov Stalin, Stalin’s great-grandson, says: “Indeed, how could a people find Stalin still popular if he has really been a bloodthirsty murderer?”

To conclude, we can explain Stalin’s actuality in this way:Russian society actually had enough of the corrupted elite in the USSR and in liberal Russia as long as the greater part of it remembers the impoverishment of the 1990s and the inability of the country to cope with organized crime. That is why Russians remember the strong political figure of Stalin.